High Court Takes Case on Vincent Foster

GINA HOLLAND

Published 8:00 pm, Sunday, May 4, 2003

Associated Press Writer

The Supreme Court on Monday resurrected a nearly decade-old dispute over the suicide of White House attorney Vincent Foster, agreeing to decide when the government must release sensitive or gruesome law enforcement records.

The government had asked the court to back its decision to withhold post-mortem pictures of Foster.

The high court must balance the privacy interest of Foster's family with the rights of others who sued to get the photos under a public records law.

More broadly, at stake is "the privacy interest of millions of individuals, about whom personal and sensitive information is stored in government files," Solicitor General Theodore Olson told the court in filings.

Foster's death, in the first year of Bill Clinton's presidency, spawned a legion of conspiracy theories that he was murdered in a White House cover-up. Foster was a kindergarten friend of Clinton and former law partner of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr headed one of the many investigations that determined Foster shot himself on July 20, 1993, at a Civil War-era park near Washington.

The justices will decide if a California attorney has a right to pictures of Foster's body. The attorney, Allan Favish, already has been given more than 100 pictures, including photos of Foster's car and the park site.

Lower courts have split over the release of more explicit pictures.

Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor and former privacy official in the Clinton administration, said justices could narrowly decide what to do about the Foster photos. Or, he said, "this could be a much broader question about how privacy will stack up against freedom of information at a time when both values are under attack."

Olson, the Bush administration's Supreme Court lawyer, said justices should use this case to clarify when lower courts must release information under the Freedom of Information Act. The law allows reporters and others to get unclassified government records that officials would not otherwise release.

Officials may withhold information that could cause "an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."

Olson said that five investigations concluded that Foster, who was depressed, killed himself. He said a sixth probe "by an unsatisfied private citizen" seemed unnecessary.

Critics of those investigations contend the photos of Foster's body will provide information about the death. None of the photos show his face or the bullet wound.

"There's nothing graphic in these photos that would be upsetting to anyone," said Reed Irvine, with the conservative group Accuracy in Media.

The attorney for the Foster family, James Hamilton, said the release of more photos would be damaging to the relatives, "invading their memory of a loved one, by subjecting them to harassment from any number of media outlets, and by leaving them vulnerable to the unwitting viewing of profoundly traumatic images."